Monday, December 19, 2011

“He [Palparan] should be imprisoned immediately, along with GMA,
Abalos, all of them who are shameless. They all should spend Christmas
in jail.” – Mrs. Concepcion EmpeñoBy RONALYN V. OLEA Bulatlat.com

MANILA – The mothers of the two missing students of the University of
the Philippines (UP) are enraged over the attempt of retired Gen.
Jovito Palparan Jr. to leave the country this morning.

Exactly four days ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a resolution
implicating Palparan, then commanding officer of the 7th Infantry
Battalion of the Philippine Army and three of his men into the
disappearance of UP students Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño.

According to reports, Palparan tried to go to Singapore around 7:30
a.m. on board a Seair flight but was prevented by immigration officials.

“Why would he escape? This only proves all the more that he is guilty
of many crimes,” Mrs. Concepcion Empeño, mother of Karen, told
Bulatlat.com in a phone interview..... MORE

While it’s no surprise that nearly 50 million Americans live below
the poverty line, new statistics from the US Census show that almost 100
million others are counted as low-income citizens, making half of the
population of America officially poor.

The latest figures out of the US Census Bureau show that in addition
to the 49.1 million Americans who fall below the official poverty line,
those that rake in enough to be between that level and the income
equitable to double it fall into a new “low-income” category, which
counts an additional 97.3 million people. Altogether, that clump of
nearly 150 million Americans living in dire economic standing accounts
for around 48 percent of the US population..... MORE

A rare meat-eating pitcher plant has re-made its insect traps into night shelters for tiny bats to have their feces as reward.

The nepenthes rafflesiana elongate, a variety of the species also
known as Raffles' pitcher plant, grows in Brunei’s muggy peat forests.
It is remarkably poor at catching insects, unlike its many cousins,
capturing about one seventh as many..... MORESource: RT.com

North Korea's veteran leader Kim Jong-il has died at the age of 69. A
tearful announcer at North Korea’s state television, dressed in black,
said on Monday the “Dear Leader” had died on Saturday morning of fatigue
and over-work.

Kim Jong-il had been battling ailing health in recent years. It is believed he suffered a stroke in 2008.

The
news has apparently shocked the people of North Korea. Kim Jong-il had
ruled the country since the death of his father, Kim Il-sung, in 1994.
Kim Jong-il's youngest son, Kim Jong-un, who is in his late 20s, has
officially been named as his father’s successor – that is according to
Reuters, who cite the country’s Central Telegraph Agency..... MORE

12/18/2011
DHAKA — When Bangladesh
became an independent nation after a bloody nine month battle with
Pakistan that ended 40 years ago Friday, Narayan Chandra Das, a Bengali
Hindu, had high hopes for his new country.

As a Hindu, Das had
been branded an “agent of India” during the war and fled when the
Pakistani army burned his village in the eastern district of Comilla to
the ground.

But when the war ended on Dec. 16, he came straight home to the new Muslim-majority nation.

Forty
years after independence, creeping Islamization, discriminatory
policies and a series of violent attacks on Hindus, have, he says, made
him wonder whether it was the right choice..... MORE

By Satur C. OcampoAt Ground Level | The Philippine Star
“Our gathering this morning is an opportunity to further assess the
strengths and weaknesses of the present criminal justice system, and to
come up with new and timely initiatives concerning the delivery of
justice… Your decisions and the steps you take have implications
integral to our democracy.”

That’s how President Aquino defined the objective of the First
National Criminal Justice Summit, a laudable initiative by the
Department of Justice, which he addressed last Monday at the Manila
Hotel. We missed being informed of the summit’s output because the media
coverage focused on P-Noy’s frontal tirades against the Supreme Court
and Chief Justice Renato Corona.

Nonetheless, the President raised a point highly relevant to today’s
observance of Human Rights Day: the injustice inflicted by Ferdinand
Marcos’ martial law regime upon his father, Ninoy Aquino, the opposition
leader who was later assassinated and now regarded as a hero.

Ninoy and Jose W. Diokno, then both senators, were arrested and held
for two years in isolated military detention. Whereas Diokno was freed
without being charged with any offense, Ninoy was dragooned into trial
and conviction by court martial on trumped-up murder and related common
criminal charges.

P-Noy summed up that ignoble procedure thus: “The dictatorship
exerted all efforts to skew justice and run roughshod over my father’s
human rights.”

With that flashback, P-Noy emphasized that he had sworn “to do
justice to every man” in executing the laws and “to make certain that
what transpired during martial law does not happen again, and ensuring
that anyone who so much as attempts to repeat the same offenses is held
accountable.”

Fast-forward to the plight of 356 political prisoners all over the
country, who have been on a week-long fast/hunger strike to press for
their immediate release. They have been charged, like Ninoy, with
trumped-up common criminal offenses. The reality is that they were
arrested for holding political beliefs different from those approved by
those in power..... MORE

12/18/2011
Not even a democratic system
is impeccable either from the mechanics or dynamics itself of the same
or from given human intransigence and imperfections operating within
that system. The tragedy lies in that there is no escape except the
destruction of the system itself and the demise of those who wheels the
inherent cyclical pattern within.

Our so called democracy has
always metamorphose into a “democrazy” especially when the
sub-institutions within the democratic system clash and mash against
each other necessarily or unnecessarily. And we, the ordinary people,
become helpless observers from below while the observers from above are
helping themselves in taking advantage of the distractions and
diversions as they freely “mind their own businesses.”.... MORE